The People's Court: Crime and punishment in Rwanda

“We know there are some norms that won’t be followed.” Fiacre Birasa, an official at the Rwandan ministry of justice, is patiently explaining his government’s predicament. “We know that we have 1 million murders. Who has done this? To make a research would take more than a million years.”

He smiles. The desk in his dark office is cluttered with files, and he points toward a battered pocket calculator resting atop the heap. He taps in “2,500,” the number of cases tried so far. Then he divides by 3, the number of years since the government started conducting trials. Western governments and human rights groups have criticized the judicial system in Rwanda. Birasa is doing the math to prove to me that the numbers are insurmountable, that even Westerners cannot argue with these figures.

“Can we continue down this road?” he asks. “You can have the best solution, but if it takes one thousand years, is it the best solution for you?”

The word Rwanda means “universe.” A Rwandan poet told me this. Long ago, he said, Rwandans thought their little country was both the center of the world and the outer limit of civilization. The country next door was called Burundi—“the other universe.” And if you look at a map of Africa, it’s easy to see how the rest of the world ignored the place: Rwanda is bounded by volcanic peaks to the north, Lake Kivu to the west, and dense forest and swampland to the east. Now that the world is taking an interest in Rwanda’s biggest problem—the pursuit of justice after genocide—it’s also easy to see why Rwandans often respond to foreigners with the resentment of a people accustomed to being left alone.

Rwanda’s justice system is famous for its unusual burden. A rural country the size of Maryland, Rwanda has the densest prison population in the world and, perhaps, the largest number of unsolved murders. Of 125,000 people living behind bars, the vast majority are charged with participating in the 1994 genocide. Millions of dollars in foreign aid have been poured into Rwanda’s justice system, but it has yet to recover from the war and genocide that killed off most of the country’s judges—as well as many others whoseeducation might have qualified them to try these crimes.

At the current rate, it would take 150 years for the government of Rwanda to judge all the genocide suspects now in custody. Birasa nods at his calculator. He is wearing a blue dress shirt that stretches taut over his round stomach, with a sensible tie and an accountant’s moustache. He looks like a lawyer, but he is not: he’s a consultant who is helping prepare the government’s plan to solve this numerical nightmare. He and his team at the ministry of justice propose to set up a genocide court in nearly every village in Rwanda; they want to let farmers, teachers, shopkeepers, and cow-herders judge those accused of committing the world’s worst crime.

The idea is not as outlandish as it may seem. In traditional Rwandan societies, minor disputes between families were arbitrated by a group of village elders in a process called gacaca (pronounced “ga-CHA-cha”), named after the grassy area where the elders would sit. A stolen chicken, a wayward goat in a neighbor’s vegetable patch, an unwed pregnant daughter: these crises were all resolved by village elders.

The new gacaca, Birasa explains, won’t rely solely on the wisdom of elders. It will depend on the firsthand experience of ordinary Rwandans. “The philosophy of gacaca is simple: the truth, only the truth. You can’t learn the truth. You know it or you don’t.” In Europe and America it’s a lawyer’s job to make a case and prove it; there are two sides to every story, and judges must consider both sides without bias, then apply the law. The result is called justice. But is it truth? Birasa sighs. The problem lies...